Mr Yuji Akaike, Assistant Director, gives an insight into Japanese culture

What made you want exhibit at this year’s annual conference and what kind of promotional things did you do?

“It’s a good opportunity for us to have a discussion about aspects of public policy practice in Japan that people in the UK are interested in, as well as meeting new potential partners.

“This year, as in every year, we have exhibited and sponsored with examples of best practice from Japan including the national nursing care insurance scheme, place branding and identity policies, community budgeting and local community transport initiatives as well as others. There are plenty of common issues, such as providing support for the elderly and the provision of public services under constrained budgets where we can learn from each other’s experience. 

“We  held a competition to win bottles of “Koshu” wine from Yamanashi Prefecture, to people signing to our e-news letter.  We have been assisting Yamanashi promote local produce entering the UK and EU market, and also produce literature on place branding relating to the prefectural governments’ policies.

“We are also recruiting for our Japan Study Tour, which will be chance for senior UK local government staff to visit our HQ and look at how we work. They can also visit Kawasaki City to get an understanding of how the city government encourages local businesses through supporting eco-technology firms and environmental regeneration.”

Did you get much interest in your stand?

Phillipa Harvey, Communications and Events, shows off the prize which is up for grabs

“Quite a lot of interest, people are always interested (perhaps a little bemused!) to see JLGC, a non UK organisation at an event for local government. However, most people are often impressed at how Japanese local government has a international engagement initiative, how it benefits Japan’s regions in supporting trade links and the additional exchange set up on the back of it.”

What was the highlight of the conference for you?

“Our Director Noboru Fujishima said the Prime Minister’s speech and Q&A session were very impressive for Japanese staff. There isn’t really a tradition of the Japanese prime minister engaging with an audience and taking questions and answers in an informal manner, as David Cameron did. His participation was also impressive underlining what appears to be really pushing the local agenda for the UK.

For more information about JLGC visit:

 www.jlgc.org.uk

Cllr Jeremy Lucas followed with an explanation of why and how Essex County Council is not closing libraries “because they are the hub of the community”.  Jeremy explained how he and Essex, while making necessary cost cuts, are making sure every citizen has a good, reliable, sustainable library service in their vicinity. They are not looking for volunteers to run libraries, but volunteer groups are ‘key holders’, able to open up libraries, making them available at times when professional librarians are unable to be there. Other services are beginning to co-habit within libraries, including local post offices and Citizens Advice Bureaux.

Simon Cane (Head of Museum Operations at Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery), described the museum and library provision in Birmingham. He explained some innovative, diverse museum exhibits over the past few years, drawing in many different types of visitor. (Indeed, walking back to the station after the conference, I saw the most unlikely bunch of museum goers walking enthusiastically out of the ‘Home of [Heavy] Metal’ exhibition.) He described also how the museum outreach programmes are working with communities to address social problems including unemployment. His final thought: partnerships are a key way of continuing provision and (necessarily) cutting costs.

There were a large number of very interesting questions. The issue of closing libraries is clearly a sensitive one. Those who are not closing libraries are applauded; those who feel they need to close libraries appear to be vilified without being given the opportunity to explain how a particular closure fits within the fuller library provision strategy for the given locality. Clearly, it’s important to understand the bigger picture.

There was a particularly interesting question on the role of ‘economies of scale’ in the provision of library services. If libraries are best when they provide a local service, where is the place for economies of scale, which presupposes larger (and therefore more generalised) provision as a means to making savings?

In the final analysis, all were in agreement on the importance of cultural services. By the same token, there was an acknowledgement that there may be too many institutions to support in the current climate if we want high-quality provision from all of them.

Jim’s experience in Seattle demonstrated that it was important for the big society and localism to be community focused. Working in a particularly disadvantaged community, they had used fake shop fronts to attract new stores and businesses to their area, set up a non-profit bike shop where young people could trade in old broken bikes for new ones and where underprivileged children could develop new skills in repairing bikes before picking a bike of their own to take home, and set up a farmers market that showcased the best of local produce and now attracts 2,500 people every Wednesday evening.

In the end, community activism has brought together 30,000 volunteers to implement 3,000 locally promoted recommendations through 38 new community plans. These projects were entirely run by the community, with support from the local city government. This was, Jim said, real community action led by local people and demonstrated that the lead in any such initiative really needed to come from local areas.

Speaking at the Local Government (LG) Group’s annual conference in Birmingham, he said: “Local authorities have an in-depth understanding of the public health and care needs of their populations, but too often they haven’t had the right systems in place to work with the local NHS to get the best health and wellbeing for their people.

“That is why we are making £1m available to support the development of health and wellbeing boards as part of local authorities. I want to ensure they are able to effectively support communities in getting access to the services that they need.”

Shadow boards have already been set up in around 97% of areas, and will provide local democratic accountability for health plans and services in the area.

Mr Lansley, a former vice-president of the LGA, talked to delegates about public health, social care – including the forthcoming Dilnott review – as well as more generally about the NHS reforms and the role of local government.

“We regard the health and social care bill as a co-production and especially a co-production with local government,” he said.

Cllr David Rogers, chairman of the LG Group’s community wellbeing board, told delegates the Group would continue to lobby for health and wellbeing boards to have the power to sign off local health commissioning plans.

Emma Harrison, founder of A4e, a social purpose company helping people into work, outlined the organisation’s use of ‘family champions’ to help troubled families get off benefits and back into work.

She highlighted a typical case of a family subject to hundreds of local government and other public service interventions over tens of years – and still facing the same problems.
“Let’s stop poking these families and make them feel as wanted as you do,” she told delegates.

“We believe every family can be a working family and that has to be our aim.”
She also highlighted the financial benefits of improving the lives of troubled families by reducing their dependence on and use of public services, using a home-made scale running from -20 to +20.

“If you are living your life at -18, you having a really crap life. You are in prison, you have abandoned your kids, you are on drugs. Every point on that scale is worth about £300,000. Some of these families are costing £1m a year – they are the negative millionaires.”

Sarah Piller from the European Commission provided an overview of the findings from the recent evaluation of public procurement directives. Key points included:

- The need to make things simpler and more flexible
- Procurement rules do ensure savings – £18bn
- Procurement procedures take time!
- Average cost per procedure 28,000 Euros
- Total costs 5.3bn less than 2% of total contract values
- SMEs win about 34% contracts by volume (60% by value)
- Direct cross border procurement 1.4% contracts, 3.6% value. (The reasons for this included lack of experience, language and legal barriers, the perception of too much local competition.)

Matthew Wynn, Cabinet Office and Nigel Kletz, Birmingham City Council both raised a number of similar issues about what they would like to see going forward:

 - a radical simplification of the current rules
- contracts for social enterprises to be exempt from procurement rules for three years to help them start out
- more flexibility
- a raised threshold for goods and services procurement
- a simple tool that allows you do things such as online dynamic purchasing
- past performance to be taken into account
- rules that are fit for the future
- more opportunities to feed back and discuss
- remove detailed procedures
- allow approved suppliers lists
- modernisation through stripping directives back to a set of principles.

The session started with some key facts about what people think about their councils:

- It’s not as clear cut as people make out – a lot of comments are positive.
- If people don’t like the council, it’s often because they have experienced poor service, think council service is wasteful or think the council hasn’t listened – the media focuses in on all this.
- Listening and engaging with residents, providing timely info about how business-like the council is, is crucial.
- On balance more people like councils than loathe them.
- A third of people say they are not aware of cuts. 

A number of speakers shared practical things they had done to improve the reputation of their councils:

- Understanding customers better – look carefully at how they divided up survey responses and know who the people are who respond to surveys.
- Inviting people who have been issued with parking tickets on to parking users’ forum.
- Getting to grips with gritting –  when the London Borough of Sutton couldn’t afford to grit everywhere, they stated clearly where they would grit, for example, near schools, and then offered to give everyone an amount free grit for their own road. There was a great response and the equivalent of one person per road cam forward. There were no complaints.
- Doing the council magazine differently. Look at this kind of communication across the whole council and across other public sector organisations and pool resources. The London Borough of Sutton uses a guest editor from the community, such as a local business person or a head teacher.
- Coventry’s My City campaign involved the Chief Executive taking to the streets and asking people what they were most proud of and what they didn’t like. This enabled him to responding live to issues, build bridges and take action based on what he heard.
- Coventry’s city-wide jam was an online conversation involving 105 cities and including 3000 people within Coventry, with a 51 per cent active contribution rate. 10 new ideas were ultimately implemented as a result.
- Developing approaches to the use of social media – Coventry Council’s Facebook page is just called Coventry and it has 18,000 fans! 

Key tips from the session were:

- Don’t be afraid to put yourself in vulnerable position.
- Focus on the quality of service, as that’s what drives reputation up.
- People can’t listen to what councils have to say unless the communication is there and it’s good!
- Build trust and confidence with people.
- Help people understand issues then they will understand why something is happening.
- Be real, have conversations with people.
- Be edgy and be honest! Say what the situation is.
- Stop the “facelessness” of local government. Put a face to the place, so that people can say, “this is the face of the place where I live!”

Councillor Robert Light, Kirklees Council, told how they have tried to shape the climate for change in their area. They have had no overall control for the last 11 years, but even at times of severe political difference and tension, they have always been able to come together for the good of the borough. Without strong leadership, they would certainly not have made the strides they have.

What they’ve done:

- Got senior officers to buy into the change agenda. It was tough, but they managed it and that’s why change was possible.
- Introduced their “One Council” initiative. Wherever you work, be it highways, refuse, or children’s services, you work for the council.
- Questioned why each department needed it’s own services, such as media or communications. This started to bring savings.
- Implemented a strong cross-party budget process, no matter who was in the chair of leadership.
- Changed the organisational culture. “We will be a different body in the future.”

Kirklees have had a lot of success, but accept that they have more to do, such as carrying out service reviews, and examining shared service and other radical options.

Councillor Tony Arbour, London Borough of Richmond upon Thames talked about their approach to different delivery models.

What they’ve done:

- Handed over functions to other authorities, for example, press and media has gone to Westminster Council.
- Subjected every department to scrutiny.
- Not allowed any new posts – they’ve used a star chamber approach if new posts are required. The recruiting manager must bring a genuine and robust business case to the chamber. Only three have been approved and this sends out a clear message.
- Carried out a postal survey of residents asking what they wanted – they achieved excellent response rates of 15 per cent. This has allowed them to break down results by ward and polling districts and gives a good idea of what residents want at a very local level. It’s important to do surveys like this, as sometimes we only hear those who speak the loudest, but this gave the opportunity for the silent people to speak.
- Took action based on what they heard, for example, residents were concerned with broken pavements, parking problems, access to shops and so on.

The council is now moving from being a providing authority to a commissioning authority. They are also trying to understand where they can join up, and where local solutions are needed.

The session was concluded by Anwen Robinson, Unit4 Business Software. As a supplier of services to the local government sector, they realised they had to change, as the sector changed. Here are some of the ways they are trying to support councils through change:

- Transparency – they offer a spend analysis utility for £499!
- Flexible engagement models – support for joint ventures and employee owned mutuals.
- Flexible service deployment and delivery models.

Anwen’s message was clear:

- There’s no future for suppliers who can’t offer something flexible for councils.
- Technology should be an enabler, not an inhibiter.
- Technology should not hold you back, it should make things easier for you.

The LG Group’s Local Productivity Programme aims to help councils move beyond efficiency to transform the way local services are delivered for the benefit of local communities. Find out more on the LG Group website.